


Hold My Hand (It's A Long Way Down)

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both like control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold My Hand (It's A Long Way Down)

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Moving things over from my tumblr, etc etc. Title taken from "Bottom of the River" by Delta Rae.

They both like control.

At first MacKenzie cringes at the doors he holds open, the chairs he pulls out, his hand on the small of her back leading through spaces. Brian, after all, rather likes letting doors hit her in the face before sneering at her about her helplessness—to the point where she’s learned to become fiercely independent in all manners, to erase all her vulnerabilities, and suppress every insecurity that he’s engendered in her mind.

Will takes her coat from the young girl working the desk and opens it, holding it out for her to slip her arms through the sleeves. Chewing on the inside of her cheek, she lets him settle it onto her shoulders and figures this is what happens when you’re bedding a man twelve years older than you who was raised with Midwestern sensibilities.

She thinks it’s about control, over her, until it isn’t.

“Hold my hand,” she says, trying to sound soothing.

But she’s only known Will five months and in that time he’s never been less than stoic and stolid and endearingly adept at being humorously indignant but Mac walked into his apartment not ten minutes ago to find him hyperventilating on his couch.

Encouraging him not to be gentle, she laces their fingers together and squeezes.

“I’m fine,” he manages to gasp, face coloring.

To which Mac laughs, feeling immediately guilty. “I think you’re not. But I don’t—what can I do to help you?”

Shaking his head, he folds his mouth into a tight line.

Somehow she’s relieved. And it’s not like she doesn’t like Will; she does, very much, and MacKenzie is of the opinion that they’re quite compatible (in the studio, over drinks, at dinner, between the sheets) otherwise what started as coffee wouldn’t have progressed to dinners and extended morning after’s and the general ilk of dating. But something settles in her, seeing that under the suits and cashmere sweaters and pressed collared shirts there’s a lack of control hidden in his skin.

Ignoring how her cocktail dress rides up she presses herself tighter against his side until he cedes to resting his head on her shoulder.

Will’s breathing doesn’t even out (it progresses from powerful exhales and ragged inhales to ghostlike pants that he tries desperately to control until finally something gives) until long after they’ve blown off their reservation at Jean Georges and Mac tamps down on every hard-engrained instinct she has to ask him what the fuck happened before she got there.

“If your refrigerator isn’t as pitiably empty as it was last week, I can make us something eat,” she offers, not bothering to pull the hem of her dress down as she untangles herself from him.

Eyes startled and wide he grabs for her waist.

“We can still go out—”

“I’m saying we don’t have to,” Mac says.

He swallows hard. “Then get my wallet and I’ll—”

“Okay, I’m going into your kitchen now to make us dinner, and if you follow me I’m going to hit you over the head with a frying pan.”

Unable to immediately respond, he unfastens the top button of his shirt, looking at her with an expression that is uncomfortably close to adoration.

“Can I help you, at least?” he asks after a moment.

The “of course” she answers in reply is short and off-hand, and she figures she has him marked, now. It’s an equation, one she understands. Will doesn’t seek to control her; he just wants to feel like he hasn’t lost control of everything.

He doesn’t explain the panic attack—not over the pasta she manages to put together, the garlic bread made from a stale loaf he finds in his pantry. Not in bed that night, as he presses them together, kissing her breathless so she can’t talk. Or the next morning, when she wakes to find his half of the bed empty and a folded index card on his pillow.

He doesn’t explain, but he does something else.

_Got called into sub at the affiliates brunch. Didn’t want to wake you. Love, W._

At first MacKenzie figures it an accident of habit, that after desperately wrenching his control back into place last night that it lapsed again. It’s only been five months. She’s been with Brian for years, but he doesn’t—

Well, he says that he does. Or did.

That, she’s certain, is about control.

For a minute she wonders if the brunch exists at all, or Will just wanted to slip out before she could question him about last night. But he’s never felt the need to escape anything else they’ve done together and even if questions are burning on her tongue they’re just dating, even if she’s not so certain of that anymore.

Will doesn’t talk about it at all, until years later.

“My mother never learned how to drive. He didn’t let her,” Will says, staring up at the ceiling as they lay side by side, not touching, one night. “He would hate you. How fucked up is it that I kind of like that?”

“I’ll take it as a compliment, if you want,” she replies, reaching for his hand.

“No, it’s fucked up,” he sighs. “It was control. And appearances, I guess. And he would make her sit in the car until he could come around and open the door for her and god fucking forbid she did it herself… my mom was afraid to do anything by herself. She knew what he was doing. And then, I don’t know. I started doing it so that maybe it wasn’t all about fear. So that someone did it because they loved her.”

Will tightens his grip on her fingers but doesn’t look at her.

She tells him about Brian not long after he tells her about his father. Three years after that she comes home, overmedicated and shaky and uncertain.

They both like control, and neither of them have any; Will holds the door open for her as they enter his office.

MacKenzie decides to fight.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
